There are some great and not-so-great ways to hop into this classic RPG from Bethesda and Obsidian
The post The Best Way To Play <i>Fallout: New Vegas</i> In 2026 appeared first on Kotaku.
As fans and media prepare to descend on the Bay Area for Super Bowl LX, what does a high-tech city like San Francisco do? Why, call in the robotaxis, of course. On Thursday, Alphabet’s Waymo began offering fully autonomous rides at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).
There are some limits. For now, SFO access is restricted to “a select number of riders.” However, access will gradually expand over the coming months. The service is also limited to the SFO Rental Car Center (pickups and drop-offs) at launch. Waymo says it will expand to other airport locations, including terminals, “in the future.”
The San Francisco Standard notes that SFO is now the third airport in Waymo’s repertoire. The San Francisco launch follows the company’s service at Phoenix Sky Harbor and San Jose Mineta. As for the Bay Area, Waymo now serves more than 260 square miles in the region.
Unfortunately, this isn’t Waymo’s only appearance in the news this week. On Wednesday, the company said one of its robotaxis struck a child, who sustained minor injuries. The incident took place on January 23 in Santa Monica. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/waymo-begins-service-at-san-francisco-international-airport-192913050.html?src=rss
Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system’s performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls “swarming.”
“The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people,” Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience.
January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an “improper state” after December’s monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft’s push to require Microsoft accounts.
The core members of the company’s Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. “Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community,” Davuluri said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Texas fight with a nurse practitioner may eventually push the Supreme Court to settle an intensifying battle between states with strict abortion-ban laws and those with shield laws to protect abortion providers supporting out-of-state patients.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Debra Lynch, a Delaware-based nurse practitioner, of breaking Texas laws by shipping abortion pills that Lynch once estimated last January facilitated “up to 162 abortions per week” in the state.
“No one, regardless of where they live, will be freely allowed to aid in the murder of unborn children in Texas,” Paxton’s press release said.
The Linux kernel has added new documentation outlining how the project would continue if Linus Torvalds were no longer able to lead development.
Ice fishing is a longstanding tradition in Nordic countries, with competitions proving especially popular. Those competitions can also tell scientists something about how social cues influence how we make foraging decisions, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.
Humans are natural foragers in even the most extreme habitats, digging up tubers in the tropics, gathering mushrooms, picking berries, hunting seals in the Arctic, and fishing to meet our dietary needs. Human foraging is sufficiently complex that scientists believe that meeting so many diverse challenges helped our species develop memory, navigational abilities, social learning skills, and similar advanced cognitive functions.
Researchers are interested in this question not just because it could help refine existing theories of social decision-making, but also could improve predictions about how different groups of humans might respond and adapt to changes in their environment. Per the authors, prior research in this area has tended to focus on solitary foragers operating in a social vacuum. And even when studying social foraging decisions, it’s typically done using computational modeling and/or in the laboratory.
Apple has acquired Israel-based startup Q.ai, a move that could provide a much-needed boost to the tech giant’s capabilities in artificial intelligence. Although Apple has not disclosed terms of the deal, sources told Financial Times that the arrangement is reportedly valued at nearly $2 billion. If that figure is accurate, the Q.ai acquisition marks Apple’s second largest acquisition to date, followed by its purchase of Beats for $3 billion back in 2014.
Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, said in a statement that Q.ai “is a remarkable company that is pioneering new and creative ways to use imaging and machine learning.” Apple hasn’t shared any specifics about how it plans to leverage the startup, but its past work indicates the possibility of Apple moving deeper into AI-powered wearables. “Patents filed by Q.ai show its technology being used in headphones or glasses, using ‘facial skin micro movements’ to communicate without talking,” the Times reported.
The startup’s founding team, including CEO Aviad Maizels, will join Apple as part of the deal. This acquisition marks Maizels’ second sale to Apple; he previously founded a three-dimensional hearing business called PrimeSense that Apple bought back in 2013.
For several months, many tech insiders have speculated that an acquisition might be Apple’s best path forward to catching up in the AI race. In the company’s Q3 earnings call in July 2025, CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that “We’re open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap.” A deal like this one could eventually lead to Apple developing its own fully in-house AI chatbot rather than relying on a competitor like Google to power artificial intelligence in its Siri assistant.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-acquires-qai-for-a-reported-2-billion-190017949.html?src=rss
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When the cold weather arrives, there’s a tendency among homeowners to focus on the interior—namely, our personal comfort and the utility bills. That’s perfectly sensible—no one wants to shiver in their own house, and no one wants to be slammed with an enormous utility bill, either. But the exterior of your house is just as important.
Heavy snow and icy buildup during extended periods of severe cold can really take a toll on your house. Snow and ice combined with melt/freeze cycles during sunny periods can do some serious (and often completely silent) damage to your home in a variety of ways, from water intrusion through your roof to ice-heavy tree branches crashing into the house. If you live somewhere where you can expect to be buried in snow and ice at some point this winter, here are the products you need to protect your house.
Snow is heavy, and your roof is designed to handle only so much of it. The chances that your roof is going to collapse are probably pretty minimal, but that doesn’t mean letting a ton of snow and ice sit on it for weeks at a time is good for your roof or the structure under it. At the same time, climbing up onto your roof to shovel or sweep snow off is not the safest thing to do. Instead, keep a snow rake on hand. Designed to be used from the ground, a snow rake is a simple tool that lets you scrape a lot of snow off your roof safely, easing the snow load and minimizing the chances that water will infiltrate the house. Just keep in mind that if you install roof cable to prevent ice dams (see below), you’ll need to be super careful using a roof rake, as you can easily snag the cable and yank it loose.
One often-overlooked problem caused by cold, snowy weather is ice buildup in roof and furnace vents. Sewer vents on the roof and furnace vents that draw in clean air and expel exhaust from your heating system can get clogged with ice, which can cause your heat to malfunction and pose a severe health hazard if fumes build up inside the home. A sewer skewer is a simple solution. It’s just a hunk of copper, really, but copper is an excellent conductor, so it absorbs heat from the sun (and your home’s own gases as they rise up) and radiates that heat back out, melting any snow and ice that form in the vent. It’s shaped to move the melting water away from the vent so it doesn’t just drip down and re-freeze. It’s incredibly simple to install (be careful on your roof, though) and can save you from disaster.
Ice dams are layers of ice that form at the edge of your roof, preventing proper drainage. Unchecked, ice dams can really do a number on your roof and even the structure of your house. Preventing ice dams can be relatively easy, however—just install some heated roof cables. Attached to the edge of your roof in a zig-zag pattern, roof cables ensure that ice dams can’t form, and melting snow and ice can drain properly into your gutters.
A common way ice and freezing temperatures can damage your house is through exterior faucets and spigots. Because they extend outside the insulated interior of the house, they’re very susceptible to freezing, and that ice can make its way into the pipe behind it, leading to a burst pipe and a very expensive problem. The solution, though, is not expensive—for about $11, a faucet cover will keep your exterior faucets ice-free and water safely inside your pipes where it belongs. Affix one to every exposed faucet or spigot around the house and you’ll have one less thing to worry about.
If you have trees near your home, heavy ice and snow can snap off branches, which then smack into your roof or walls—and those ice-laden branches will be heavy when they hit your house. Being a little proactive and trimming back branches—especially old, dead ones—is the best way to prevent that from happening. If you don’t want to call a professional to trim back a few branches, pick up a mini-chainsaw to get the job done. If your branches are a little more than a mini can handle, a full-size chainsaw might be needed—but be sure you know how to handle it, especially if you’re going to be climbing a ladder to use it.
Like ice dams on your roof, your gutters can become clogged with snow and ice, preventing proper drainage and leading to rot and water intrusion. Gutter heaters are an easy solution that prevents ice and snow buildup, ensuring everything drains away from your roof and your house as intended.
The freeze/melt cycle can be particularly hard on your hardscapes, including driveways and patios. Meltwater gets into small cracks and then freezes, expanding and widening those cracks. After a while, your pavement or asphalt is chewed up and needs replacing. You can do a few things to prevent (or at least slow down) this destruction. Filling cracks in asphalt or concrete as they form with a filler sealer means water can’t get into them in the first place. And sealing your asphalt or concrete surfaces will protect them during those weeks when ice is sitting there, melting and freezing over and over again as temperatures fluctuate.
A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic, according to a report by Reuters. The suit accuses the AI company of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and compositions.
These songs were then allegedly fed into the chatbot Claude for training purposes. There are some iconic tunes named by Universal in the suit, including tracks by The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Elton John, among many others. Concord is an independent publisher that handles artists like Common, Killer Mike and Korn.
The publishers issued a statement saying that the damages could amount to more than $3 billion. This would make it one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in US history.
“While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire has in fact been built on piracy,” the lawsuit says.
The suit was filed by the same legal team as last year’s Bartz v. Anthropic case. The music publishers say they found that Anthropic had been illegally downloading thousands of songs during the discovery process of that suit.
For the unfamiliar, the Bartz v. Anthropic case ended with an award of $1.5 billion to impacted writers after it was found that the company had illegally downloaded their published works for similar training purposes. The terms of that agreement dictated that the 500,000 authors involved in the case would get $3,000 per work. The $1.5 billion looks like a big number, but not so much when broken down like that. Also, Anthropic is worth around $350 billion.
In the Bartz case, Judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its models on copyrighted content but not legal to acquire that content via piracy. We’ll have to wait and see how this new suit shakes out. The legal precedent here seems to suggest that if Anthropic would have just spent a buck on each copyrighted song, then they’d be in the clear. That’s an odd distinction when it comes to building an entire company around snatching up copyrighted content, but whatever.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/music-publishers-sue-anthropic-for-3-billion-over-flagrant-piracy-185459358.html?src=rss
The private equity industry is experiencing a quiet reckoning as hundreds of midsize firms find themselves trapped between investors who have lost patience and portfolios of companies they cannot sell at acceptable prices.
“There is existential risk for a number [of funds] because of the fundraising environment,” said Sunaina Sinha Haldea, global head of private capital advisory at Raymond James. “If existing investors don’t come and support them, new investors are highly unlikely to.”
According to data from Preqin, the average buyout fund that closed in 2025 spent 23 months fundraising, up from 16 months in 2021, and the total number of funds raised fell to 1,191 from 2,679 over the same period. New York’s Vestar Capital scrapped plans for its eighth fund in late 2024 and has not invested in a new portfolio company since 2023. The firm’s assets under management dropped from $7 billion fifteen years ago to $3.3 billion in 2024.
Three-year annualized returns through June 2025 for the Cambridge Associates U.S. Private Equity Index stand at 7.4%, trailing the MSCI World stock index by 11 percentage points annually. The average holding period for buyout deals has stretched to 6.3 years from 5.1 years in 2020. Blue-chip megafunds continue raising capital normally, but smaller firms face existential pressure.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta CFO Susan Li says the company still has “optimism in the future of VR”, and confirmed that it’s still “building future headsets”.
Li made the comment during Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings call this week, in response to a Deutsche Bank analyst asking whether the Reality Labs division would have a “narrow focus on wearables”.
“However, consumer adoption of VR has generally been on a slower growth path than wearables, and we are rebalancing our Reality Labs portfolio to reflect this”, Li also said, reiterating what CTO Andrew Bosworth declared in Davos last week.
“So, we are meaningfully reducing our investment in VR and Horizon this year, but we’re growing our investment in wearables to capitalize on the momentum that we’re seeing in our position as a market leader”, she continued.
Meta first officially confirmed this shifting spending strategy in December. Then, earlier this month the company shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
Earlier in the Q4 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company’s reduction in spending would make VR “a profitable ecosystem over the coming years”.
The Reality Labs division of Meta, which handles VR, Horizon Worlds, and smart glasses, recorded record spending in Q4, just shy of $7 billion. Given revenue of just under $1 billion, that resulted in a “loss” of around $6 billion.
Reality Labs continues to be heavily focused on research and development, though, and much of this “loss” is actually the spending towards developing true AR glasses, the “holy grail” consumer tech product that companies like Apple, Meta, and Google believe will define the next wave of personal computing.
Zuckerberg told investors to expect Reality Labs losses to finally peak in 2026, with Li stating that it’s Meta’s “expectation” that the losses will start to decrease in 2027, depending on how the market develops.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
As to the “headsets”, plural, that Susan Li was referring to, leaked internal memos from early December revealed that in addition to the widely reported ultralight headset with a tethered puck, Meta was also now working on a traditional new Quest focused on “immersive gaming”.
The memo indicated that the headset, which wouldn’t be expected until late 2027 at the very earliest, should bring a “large upgrade” over Quest 3, but no longer be subsidized, carrying a higher price. That tracks with Zuckerberg’s reference to VR becoming “profitable” for Meta “over the coming years”.
Many in the industry have speculated that this headset may have already been canceled in the wake of Meta’s other VR cuts, but Li’s reference to “headsets” may suggest it’s still in the works. Only time – or yet another leak – will tell.
New settings options aim to help with framerates on PC
The post <i>Highguard’</i>s First Patch Brings Much-Requested Fixes, But PC Optimization Is Still Being Worked On appeared first on Kotaku.
This past summer, Google DeepMind debuted Genie 3. It’s what’s known as a world world, an AI system capable of generating images and reacting as the user moves through the environment the software is simulating. At the time, DeepMind positioned Genie 3 as a tool for training AI agents. Now, it’s making the model available to people outside of Google to try with Project Genie.
To start, you’ll need Google’s $250 per month AI Ultra plan to check out Project Genie. You’ll also need to live in the US and be 18 years or older. At launch, Project Genie offers three different modes of interaction: World Sketching, exploration and remixing. The first sees Google’s Nano Banana Pro model generating the source image Genie 3 will use to create the world you will later explore. At this stage, you can describe your character, define the camera perspective — be it first-person, third-person or isometric — and how you want to explore the world Genie 3 is about to generate. Before you can jump into the model’s creation, Nano Banana Pro will “sketch” what you’re about to see so you can make tweaks. It’s also possible to write your own prompts for worlds others have used Genie to generate.
One thing to keep in mind is that Genie 3 is not a game engine. While its outputs can look game-like, and it can simulate physical interactions, there aren’t traditional game mechanics here. Generations are also limited to 60 seconds, as is the presentation, which is capped at 24 frames per second and 720p. Still, if you’re an AI Ultra subscriber, this is a cool opportunity to see the bleeding edge of what DeepMind has been working over the past couple of years.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/googles-project-genie-lets-you-generate-your-own-interactive-worlds-183646186.html?src=rss
Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation.
The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct “red-team” exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars.
The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using the types of real-world attacks the defenses are designed to repel. The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted “physical attacks,” including “lockpicking,” against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn’t cause significant damage.
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Zendaya is busy. Euphoria, which she produces in addition to starring in, is finally set to return for its third season on April 12, four years after our last visit to East Highland, and nearly seven since it premiered.
As frustrating as these between-season breaks can be, they leave plenty of time to explore other tales of the wild lives of high schoolers. It’s all relative, though: While growing up in never a picnic, there’s drama, and then there’s drama. These 15 streamalikes vary widely in tone and style, but they all make clear that being a young person in the 21st century is not f*cking easy. Stream the first two seasons of Euphoria on HBO Max.
Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) is an endlessly naïve scholarship student; Bela (Amrit Kaur) is an aspiring comedy writer on the make for the hottest guys; Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott) is an overachieving athlete and senator’s daughter;and Leighton (Reneé Rapp) is a closeted sorority girl. They’re all randomly assigned to room together as freshmen at the fictional Essex College in Vermont. Created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, this comedy-drama isn’t nearly as salacious as its title suggests. There’s sex for sure, but like Sex and the City before it, the funny, queer-friendly show is more about female friendship. Stream The Sex Lives of College Girls on HBO Max.
Period drama is having a moment, and this one goes way, way back…to the 1990s. This British comedy-drama stars the brilliant Sharon Rooney (you might know her as Lawyer Barbie) as Rae Earl, a 16-year-old who just spent several months in a psychiatric hospital for a cocktail of mental health issues, poor body image being near the top of that list. Heading back to school, she tries to conceal the truth of her absence and ongoing challenges—with expectedly mixed results. Despite the show’s comedy elements, it’s about as good a narrative about growing up with serious mental health issues as you’re likely to find. Rooney won a well-deserved Best Actress BAFTA for her performance. Stream My Mad Fat Diary on Prime Video, Hulu, and Tubi.
This British import feels a bit like a latter-day Skins, featuring a scholastic setting and a talented cast of young stars-in-waiting (including leads Josh Tedeku and Jodie Campbell). At the (fictional) prestigious boarding school St. Gilbert’s, five Black teens are newly attending on scholarships, but their integration into the existing cliques is less than smooth. The blend of coming-of-age drama with a willingness to take the piss when it comes to the whole “rich private school thing” makes this Tubi original a smashing good time. Stream Boarders on Tubi.
Teen drama at its finest and most bitchy, Gossip Girl follows the many scandals of a group of young Upper East Side socialites and hangers-on. The tangled teenage lives of Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), her best frenemy Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), scholarship kid Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), and plenty more pretty young boys and girls are chronicled in meticulous detail by the title’s mysterious, omnipresent Gossip Girl (voiced by Kristen Bell). This one shares with Emily an impeccable sense of style, as its leads never miss a fashion beat. It all seems a bit tame when help up to Euphoria, but the show carved a path nonetheless, scandalizing parents in the mid-aughts. (The two-season 2021 follow-up is also available on HBO Max.) Stream Gossip Girl on HBO Max and Netflix.
Andrea and Marco are twin brothers (both played by Mattia Carrano) with a broad circle of friends living in modern day Italy. Marco has a history of self-harm that impacted his burgeoning swimming career, while Andrea has a secret social media life,messaging men while presenting as a woman. Sexual and gender exploration is the prime mover here, but the show also deals realistically with issues like drugs and bullying and any number of other coming-of-age trials. A bit of a hidden gem. Stream Prisma on Prime Video.
With a bit of Gossip Girl’s juicy style, Elite follows a group of working-class friends who wind up with scholarships to Las Encinas, a fictional private school that is, in the show’s universe, the most exclusive in Spain. What they find there is snobbery, for sure, but also mystery, murder, and lots and lots of sex (between and among characters of various sexual orientations and numerical groupings). The smart, wonderfully trashy show ran for an almost shocking (in our modern streaming era) eight seasons, with a couple of regional remakes. Stream Elite on Netflix.
This top-tier teen drama stars Ama Qamata as Puleng Khumalo, a teenage girl who’s lived her entire life in the shadow of a sister who was taken as a baby by human traffickers (Puleng’s parents still hold a birthday celebration for the sister each year). When invited to a party by popular Fikile Bhele (Khosi Ngema), a student at an elite school in Cape Town, Puleng can’t help noticing their similarities. Steeped in the story of her sister, Puleng transfers to the school to get to the bottom of things. There’s plenty of juicy high school drama and family secrets in the mix, but the show is elevated by its unexpected dramatic heft and a multitude of queer characters and storylines. (This is ostensibly a South Africa remake of Elite, but its flavor and sense of identity are so unique that you’d hardly notice.) Stream Blood & Water on Netflix.
Comedian Benito Skinner plays himself, sort of, in this buzzy comedy that sees a former high school jock facing his freshman year in college while desperately trying to convince himself and everyone else that he’s as straight as they come (relatable, except for the jock part). Much of the appeal is in its deft blending of tones: It’s a frequently raunchy college comedy and simultaneously a sweet coming-of-age story about accepting yourself without worrying about what everyone else thinks. The cast includes Adam DiMarco (The White Lotus) and Rish Shah (Ms. Marvel) and while it definitely doesn’t go as hard as Euphoria, there are moments of real drama and heartbreak. Stream Overcompensating on Prime Video.
Many of us come from families with philosophies that could be described as less than sex positive. Which is not great. This popular British series imagines the life of a teenager with a parent on the opposite end of that spectrum: Mom (Gillian Anderson) is a sex therapist who’s not particularly good at romantic relationships. As a result, Asa Butterfield’s Otis Milburn grew up with an ambivalence toward the topic—a lack of interest that held until he realized that his inside knowledge of doing the deed could earn him friends (and paying customers) at school. Alongside some classmates, he establishes his own clinic to help his fellow students with their sexual concerns. In the process, Otis, and the show, address a wide range of issues, from birth control and abortion, to masturbation, sexually transmitted diseases, and developing sexual identities. Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa (Doctor Who) also star. Stream Sex Education on Netflix.
Industry isn’t concerned with a power struggle among people at the top of the ladder; instead, its focus is the fight to climb said ladder. The young wannabe investment bankers it follows would all love to be the terrible rich people from that other show. The main characters come from a variety of backgrounds, but they’re all competing for a limited number of permanent positions at the fictional Pierpoint & Co., a London bank, and they’ll do anything it takes to earn their shot at the big prize. The setting here is seemingly very different from Euphoria‘s vague greater Los Angeles, and the whole investment banking thing hardly doesn’t line up with the trials of high school, but there’s a a definite vibe match, as young people face high pressure situations and fight to stay above water in a world rife with traps and temptations. Stream Industry on HBO Max.
Director Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Queer) created this series about two American teenagers, Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer) and Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamón), living with their families on a U.S. military base in Chioggia, Italy. Fraser’s two moms are both in the army, but he’s new to base life. Caitlin, on the other hand, has lived in Chioggia for years with her conservative father. Over the course of a summer, the two gradually bond over their mutual feelings of isolation, as well as their explorations of gender and sexuality. Stream We Are Who We Are on HBO Max.
As with many teen dramas, Baby kicks off at an elite boarding school (poor kids come of age too, ya know), but this one has a fairly wild spin: It’s based (quite loosely) on a real-life Italian scandal involving teen sex workers. Benedetta Porcaroli (Immaculate) stars as Chiara, a rich kid who makes a new bestie in Ludovica (Alice Pagani), who needs money and happens to know a very sketchy guy who might be able to help her earn it. The tone is somehow less lascivious than the premise suggests, although the sex-work-as-teenage-rebellion angle is not for every taste. Stream Baby on Netflix.
There’s a lot of backstory here that you don’t really need to know to enjoy the show, but in brief, Heartbreak High is a sorta soft-reboot of a popular and long-running 1990s show in Australia, which was itself a spin-off from a 1993 movie. There’s a solid blend of teen drama (sealing with issues related to gender identity, race, and teen sexuality) and comedy (the main characters corralled into the Sexual Literacy Tutorial, with the unfortunate acronym SLT). It all starts with Amelie and Harper, two students at a diverse Sydney high school, who set off a firestorm when they create a detailed map of the sexual exploits of the student body. Stream Heartbreak High on Netflix.
“What the hell is this doing here?” you’re probably asking yourself. And, fair. But hear me out: This reimagining of the once entirely wholesome Archie comics universe is generally way over-the-top, but it tackles the trials and tribulations of growing up (including recurring storylines involving substance abuse) in a similarly…let’s say “operatic” fashion. It veers wildly between genres, starting out by blending several coming-of-age storylines with a hot-for-teacher whodunnit: The dour, elderly Miss Grundy of the comics is younged up and is having an affair with Archie in the series opener, leading in to a bloody murder mystery. Before long, we’re folding in supernatural horror and alternate universes, things made all the weirder by the way the show seems to take itself absolutely seriously in the face of one bonkers plot twist after another. It’s the whackadoo comic-book version of Euphoria. Steam Riverdale on Netflix.
The popular and controversial British series launched names like Nicholas Hoult, Daniel Kaluuya, and Dev Patel while dealing with hot-button issues like mental illness, substance abuse, and bullying. The show also never forgets—not even for one episode—that it’s about teenagers, and doesn’t shy away from the sex lives of its large (and ever-changing) cast of characters. There’s a pretty straight line to be drawn between the success of Skins and that of Euphoria. Stream Skins on Hulu.
Apple has acquired Q.AI, a secretive Israeli startup whose technology can analyze facial skin micro-movements to interpret “silent speech,” in a deal valued at close to $2 billion that marks the iPhone maker’s second-largest acquisition ever, according to backer GV (formerly Google Ventures).
The four-year-old company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2022 by Aviad Maizels, Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya. Patents filed by Q.AI show its technology being deployed in headphones or smart glasses to enable non-verbal communication with an AI assistant. The acquisition comes as Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses already let wearers talk to its AI, and Google and Snap are preparing to launch competing devices later this year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
